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N0KFQ > TODAY 11.01.15 15:35l 80 Lines 3867 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Jan 11
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Sent: 150111/1433Z 44473@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA BPQ1.4.62
Jan 11, 2010:
Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank, dies at 100
On this day in 2010, Miep Gies, the last survivor of a small
group of people who helped hide a Jewish girl, Anne Frank, and
her family from the Nazis during World War II, dies at age 100 in
the Netherlands. After the Franks were discovered in 1944 and
sent to concentration camps, Gies rescued the notebooks that Anne
Frank left behind describing her two years in hiding. These
writings were later published as "Anne Frank: The Diary of a
Young Girl," which became one of the most widely read accounts of
the Holocaust.
Miep Gies was born into a working-class, Catholic family in
Vienna, Austria, on February 15, 1909. At age 11, with food
shortages in her native land following World War I, she was sent
to the Netherlands to live with a foster family who nicknamed her
Miep (her birth name was Hermine Santrouschitz). In 1933, she
went to work as a secretary for Otto Frank, who ran a small
Amsterdam company that produced a substance used to make jam. By
the following year, Frank's wife and two daughters, Margot and
Anne, had left their native Germany to join him in the Dutch
capital.
In May 1940, the Germans, who had entered World War II in
September of the previous year, invaded the Netherlands and
quickly made life increasingly restrictive and dangerous for the
country's Jewish population. In early July 1942, the Frank family
went into hiding in an attic apartment behind Otto Frank's
business. They were eventually joined by Otto Frank's business
associate and his wife and son, as well as Miep Gies' dentist,
all of whom were Jewish. Gies, along with her husband Jan, a
Dutch social worker, and several of Otto Frank's other employees
risked their own lives to smuggle food, supplies and news of the
outside world into the secret apartment (which came to be known
as the Secret Annex). Gies and her husband even spent a night in
hiding with the group to learn firsthand what it was like.
On August 4, 1944, after 25 months in hiding, the eight people in
the Secret Annex were discovered by the Gestapo, the German
secret state police, who had learned about the hiding place from
an anonymous tipster who has never been definitively identified.
Gies was working in the building at the time of the raid and
avoided arrest because the officer was from her native Vienna and
felt sympathy for her. She later went to police headquarters and
tried, unsuccessfully, to pay a bribe to free the group.
The occupants of the Secret Annex were sent to concentration
camps; only Otto Frank survived. After he was liberated from
Auschwitz by Soviet troops in January 1945, he returned to
Amsterdam, where Miep Gies gave him a collection of notebooks and
several hundred loose papers containing observations the teenage
Anne Frank had penned during her time in hiding. Gies recovered
the materials from the Secret Annex shortly after the Franks'
arrest and hid them in her office desk. She avoided reading the
papers during the war out of respect for Anne's privacy.
Otto Frank, who lived with the Gies family after the war,
compiled his daughter's writings into a manuscript that was first
published in the Netherlands in 1947 under the title "Het
Acheterhuis" ("Rear Annex"). Later published in English as "Anne
Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl," the book went on to sell tens
of millions of copies worldwide.
In 1987, Gies published a memoir, "Anne Frank Remembered," in
which she wrote: "I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the
long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and
more--much more--during those dark and terrible times years ago,
but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear
witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened
then."
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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